Agricultural water management and climate risk

Feasible investments in agricultural water management are likely to bring the greatest livelihood benefit to the rural poor of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia if they are part of a comprehensive approach to managing climate risk, according to a new report from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

“Despite the known impacts of current climate risk and growing concern about future climate change, climate risk management remains conspicuously absent from many analyses and regional development strategies,” write Casey Brown and James Hansen, the authors of the report, called Agricultural Water Management and Climate Risk (download it here). The report was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will help guide the foundation’s investment strategy in agricultural and water development in the face of climate variability.

“We need to take a more holistic view of the risks that farmers face. We’ve found that conventional agricultural water management in combination with other climate risk management strategies can be a much more powerful engine of development than just the water management alone,” said Casey Brown, who leads IRI’s Water program.

Climate change is expected to exacerbate many development challenges in Africa and South Asia, but in ways that can only be partially anticipated. A growing body of evidence links climate-based water variability to poor economic growth in developing countries. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa agriculture accounts for 70% of employment and 35% of the region’s gross domestic product. Of the 183 million hectares of agricultural land there, only about 9 million are under some form of water management–mostly small-scale approaches, such as irrigation systems and farm ponds. Most farmers depend solely on rainwater to grow their crops.

Future efforts to increase agricultural productivity in the region will most likely center on more of these small-scale water management and storage strategies, note Brown and Hansen. While these provide mitigation of slight or moderate departures from normal rainfall, they are less capable of managing climate extremes such as droughts and floods, which threaten to reverse years of development gains.

The authors recommend that a strategy for investing in agricultural water management should include a multipronged approach to dealing with the full range of climate variability.

The authors propose three specific areas of investment that are timely, feasible and target a different layer of risk:

• Don’t assume climate is static. Develop a climate-informed investment strategy for water management.
• Support rural climate information services. Invest in climate data sets, work with national meteorological services to produce tailored seasonal forecasts, train employees of agriculture extension services and nongovernmental organizations to communicate climate information and risk, etc.
• Create integrated early warning systems. These support more timely and better coordinated response to climatic shocks such as droughts and floods that exceed the coping capacity of rural communities.

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